BOOK REVIEW: The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann by Virginia Pye

 I received this book for free from Netgalley. That did not influence this review.

The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann by Virginia Pye is the story of a woman author’s triumph in Gilded Age Boston.

Victoria Meeks is an enormously successful Romance-Adventure author, writing under the pen-name Victoria Swann and living a hidden and unhappy life as Mrs. Byrne. She’s at a crossroads. Her marriage is a diaster. She has grown bored with writing romance and wants to create something serious. And her publisher has just been bought out and is soon to go under. She desperately needs a change.

While any one of her many, many readers would imagine Victoria’s life to be a series of exciting adventures taking place all over the world, in truth Victoria has never traveled anywhere. She loves writing but hates being forced to churn out very similar novels one after another, along with a series of shorter penny-dreadfuls, and writing (or at least putting her name on) an advice column for troubled young women. She’s worn down. While it’s true she has made a fair amount of money, her publisher has made a huge fortune off of her, something Victoria is only beginning to understand. When she tries to tell her editor that she wants to stop writing her popular series and try something grittier and true-to-life, he tells her no. She cannot. She has to write what sells.

But Victoria knows her own mind. In the face of numerous challenges, she reinvents herself.

The novel is both a critique and a defense of romance literature. But it is a very definite critique of the way men have looked down on women’s literature while reaping the profits of women writers and a female readership. This is an enjoyable peek into the world of the late 1800s in Boston. Victoria’s difficulties seemed a little too easily resolved at times, but she is a feisty heroine and easy to root for.